Warning Wire

Rats, radiation and the cellphone: A large study conducted by the National Toxicology Program has found that male rats exposed to some kinds of cellphone radiation are more likely to develop cancerous heart tumors and brain tumors. It’s difficult to say just what the highly anticipated final results mean for human cellphone users. For one thing, the study used radio frequencies that are now out of date–2G and 3G technology–and the rats were exposed to much higher doses over longer periods than heavy cellphone users experience. Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, director of the FDA Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said the findings “should not be applied to human cellphone usage.” But others argue that the results raise public health concerns given the billions of cellphone users across the globe, including small children who will log decades of exposure. Ron Melnick, a now-retired researcher who helped design the study, told Microwave News, an online publication focused on the health effects of non-ionizing radiation, “It’s time for the FCC and the FDA to tell the public that cell phone radiation can cause cancer.”

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Ten times more powerful than fentanyl: The Food and Drug Administration has approved a powerful new opioid despite objections from experts and lawmakers worried that the product could worsen an already dire public health crisis. Dsuvia is the tablet form of an opioid previously available through IV delivery. It’s about 10 times more powerful than fentanyl, which has proven deadly on the black market. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said the approval was based in part on the fact that the tablet will be useful to the military, Ed Silverman of STAT reported. Dr. Raeford Brown, an anesthesiologist, chaired an advisory panel that reviewed the drug and recommended its approval despite his objections. He criticized Gottlieb’s actions. “Clearly the issue of the safety of the public is not important to the commissioner,” Brown said in a press release issued with the consumer group Public Citizen. “I will continue to hold the agency accountable for their response to the worst public health problem since the 1918 influenza epidemic.”

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‘Greyhound therapy’: A Las Vegas jury found that homeless patients of a Nevada psychiatric hospital who were discharged onto buses and shipped out of state are each entitled to $250,000 in damages, The Sacramento Bee reports. Reporters from the newspaper were named finalists for a Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for their coverage of patient dumping by Nevada’s primary mental health center. Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital bused some 1,500 people out of state in a period of about five years, and many of them subsequently died, went missing, or committed serious crimes, The Bee found. The lawsuit could affect hundreds of people treated with what was dubbed “Greyhound therapy.”

Also: After a ProPublica investigation found numerous allegations of sexual assault and abuse of children admitted to Aurora Chicago Lakeshore Hospital, the Illinois child welfare agency said it would stop sending people in its care to the psychiatric hospital. But it would not initiate the independent investigation that patient and child advocates are demanding.

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‘We were wrong’: If the latest report from the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change raised your climate anxiety a few degrees, you may want to hold off on reading this one. A study published in the journal Nature used a novel way of measuring ocean temperature and found that the world’s oceans may already be much warmer than previously thought, which means the world must act with even more urgency than stated by the IPCC. “We thought that we got away with not a lot of warming in both the ocean and the atmosphere for the amount of CO2 that we emitted,” Laure Resplandy, a Princeton geoscientist who led the study group, told The Washington Post. “But we were wrong. The planet warmed more than we thought. It was hidden from us just because we didn’t sample it right. But it was there. It was in the ocean already.”

Also: There’s more evidence that China is producing CFC-11, an industrial gas that contributes to global warming and was banned under the Montreal Protocol. –– The latest attempt by the federal government to have the climate change case filed against it by 21 children and young adults failed, though the path forward isn’t entirely clear. –– Susan Ormiston of CBC News explores how Yukon glaciers are changing. –– The outcome of gubernatorial races could dramatically shape regional response to climate change, Umair Irfan of Vox writes.

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Deaths on the job: In a rare case of criminal charges following a workplace death, two managers at an Ohio aluminum company have been indicted for conspiracy to obstruct justice. Extrudex Aluminum employee John J. Tomlin Jr., 21, was killed in October 2012, when a rack of hot aluminum parts fell over and pinned him. A 19-year-old co-worker suffered serious burns. General Manager Brian K. Carder and Safety Coordinator Paul Love are accused of hatching a plan to provide false statements to investigators from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, failing to produce emails about safety issues, and threatening employees’ jobs if they did not recant statements about safety issues at the plant, according to a Department of Labor press release. Carder and Love have pleaded not guilty, the Associated Press reports.

Also: Northeast Framing faces proposed penalties of $311,330 for failing to properly train workers at an East Boston construction site or to provide adequate equipment, after 48-year-old carpenter Jose Rodriguez fell four stories to his death in May. –– OSHA once again has cited Crown Roofing of Florida for exposing workers to fall hazards, after the company allowed employees to install roofing without a fall protection system, the 13th such citation issued to the company since 2014. –– Arrow Plumbing of Missouri has admitted to willfully violating safety standards meant to protect people working in a trench from a dangerous cave-in, after an employee was killed in December 2016. The company and its successor, R2 Plumbing, will complete training, hire a safety consultant to implement a trench safety program, conduct regular safety audits, and pay a $225,000 penalty, according to a press release.

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A gun tradition: Rosemary Westwood looks at the deep-running family tradition of guns and what it means for gun control in America. “It was neat to be able to find this thing my dad and I could bond over, my grandpa and I could bond over, my uncles, that all these different people and I could share,” Alexis Lagan of USA Shooting and a 2020 Olympic hopeful told Westwood about her early days in competitive shooting.

Also: About 100 volunteers with the Texas Minutemen and other militia groups are headed to the border to respond to caravans of Central American immigrants in Mexico. Mary Lee Grant and Nick Miroff of The Washington Post report that, asked if they would go with weapons, Minuteman President Shannon McGauley laughed and said, “This is Texas, man.”

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It’s Yuma romaine season: The lettuce-growing season for the desert valleys of the Southwest begins this month and runs through April, and this year growers will face more scrutiny, writes Geoffrey Mohan of the Los Angeles Times. Last year, lettuce tainted with a powerful strain of e. coli killed five people and sickened another 205 in 36 states. The Food and Drug Administration believes the bacteria came from an irrigation canal that ran alongside a massive cattle feed lot. Growers have promised to treat any water used from canals near the feed lot, and the FDA will routinely test samples of romaine grown in the region, Mohan writes. Thomas Gremillion, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America, said in a press release that the FDA plan so far “calls into question whether the industry has an adequate response to prevent another tragedy like this one.”

Also: The FDA has had the authority to enforce mandatory food recalls since 2011, but has used the power infrequently and only now is issuing official guidance on how it will do so in the future. “Our aim is to expand the appropriate use of our mandatory recall authority in cases where we have to intervene quickly to help protect consumers from unsafe products,” FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in a press release.

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E-cigs on the beach: Vaping has gotten a lot of attention this year as a threat to youth and to decades of public health efforts aimed at reducing tobacco use. But what about as a single-use product that ends up in the waste stream? Mari A. Schaefer of The Philadelphia Inquirer writes that e-cigarettes are made of some parts that are recyclable and some parts–like the lithium batteries–that are considered hazardous waste. But there’s little guidance from manufacturers on how to dispose of them properly, and the cartridges are showing up where they’re not wanted. “We started seeing them a number of years ago,” Cindy Zipf, executive director of a nonprofit organization that monitors beach-cleanup reports from the New Jersey Shore, told Schaefer. “Most of us didn’t even know what they were.”

Also: The Los Angeles city attorney is seeking injunctions against three California-based e-cigarette companies, alleging that they failed to take precautions against online sales to minors, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Chelsea Conaboy is a FairWarning contributor and freelance writer and editor specializing in health care. Find more of her work at chelseaconaboy.com.

One problem with the item on the NTP cell phone cancer study is that it does not reference the results of the Ramazzini Institute study, which were announced shortly after the peer-reviewed results from NTP in March. This major animal study from Italy on cell tower radiation effects involved rats exposed to far-lower intensities than the NTP studies, and well within the everyday cell phone intensity range. The results showed similar cancers, tumors and DNA breakage as were found in NTP. This is an important piece of news to include. https://microwavenews.com/news-center/more-coincidence

I have several bones to pick with Mr. Shuren’s very traditionally FDA statement. Number one, the FDA was responsible for pre-market testing of cell phones way back when, and traded that responsibility to pre-test and regulate cell phones in exchange for the industry’s promise to do a $28 million health research program, dubbed Wireless Technology Research, headed by industry-friendly George Carlo. What they didn’t anticipate was that some of the research would show DNA breakage and tumors. When it did, they ended the research program, and never advised the public. FDA’s appeared to be in industry’s pocket ever since.

In his comments, Mr. Shuren stated: “In fact, we only begin to observe effects to animal tissue at exposures that are 50 times higher than the current whole body safety limits set by the FCC for radiofrequency energy exposure.” This statement is confusing to me. I don’t believe he is talking about the NTP study here, but rather has switched to talking about the FCC exposure guidelines in general, which are based on one kind of biological effect only—-heat damage from high intensity frequencies. These “whole body safety limits” supposedly protect the public with a 50-fold safety margin, and workers with a 10-fold safety margin. In fact, given the level at which cancers showed up in the NTP study, it turns out the safety margin is, in reality, less than 4-fold, and that’s assuming you accept the now-outmoded hypothesis that heating is the only biological effect of concern. Furthermore, you have to look at the Ramazzini results, where exposures were much lower, well within the range of normal cell phone exposures, and still the cancers were seen. See James Lin’s article from an IEEE publication https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8425056/ He is an expert who has been respected worldwide, even by the industry, over the years. Or read excerpts at https://www.saferemr.com/search?q=analysis+of+ntp

Mr. Shuren also questioned the: “…unusual findings in the study, such as: the rats exposed to whole body radiofrequency energy lived longer than rats that were not exposed to any radiation (control group); only male rats exposed to the highest radiofrequency energy dosage developed a statistically significant number of heart schwannomas, which are very rare in humans, when compared to the control group in this experiment. There was also no true dose response, or a lack of a clear relationship between the doses of radiation administered to the animals and their subsequent tumor rate.”

First, it is not unusual to find some positive results from RF exposure in some studies. With better knowledge of these processes, and careful controls, they may be put to positive medical use. Second, sex differences in cancer incidence is nothing unusual. Third, heart schwannomas are rare in rats, too, not just humans, and other heart abnormalities were also found in exposed rats. Fourth, many experiments with non-ionizing radiation do not exhibit dose-response effects–some do, some don’t. That does not disqualify them. There may be window effects as there are with many other agents. We are talking about living biological systems and an agent that is not as easy to track or control, and may not behave the same as chemical agents. Please see Dr. Joel Moskowitz’s remarks on NTP for a more careful epidemiological analysis of the results. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rFlZuM6sljTU-XLGDeTQrmWPT6blCdZy/view You will see, besides cancers, there were a number of pre-cancerous hyperplasias, as well as tumor incidence increases (i.e., in female rats) that did not reach significance.

I have very little positive confidence in Mr. Shuren’s remarks. I believe they are remarks of convenience. How bad would FDA look if it admitted concerns and did nothing. Nothing is what it intends to do. I had conversations with Abiy Desta back when he was the prime cell phone liaison between FDA and the industry. He was a good ally to both of them. I asked him why the FDA claimed that it ensured all cell phones met the FCC guidelines, when he knew the SAR body testing was being done (by industry) with a distance of a few critical millimeters away from the test “body,” rather than right up against it, thus significantly underestimating the actual radiation absorbed by the body in normal use. He said, “Yeah, we asked the FCC why they granted that exemption to the industry when they did SAR testing.” “And…?” “They never got back to us.” Meanwhile, France has re-tested cell phone body SARs, this time up against the body (with no mm distance), to compare with advertised SARs. They found 90% of cell phones tested without this intervening distance exceeded exposure guidelines. So there you can see, your FDA watchdog has hardly been at work protecting the public.

Like you, many press reports have questioned the applicability of the NTP findings to the use of handheld cell phones because: 1) the NTP used an outdated signal (2G), and 2) the exposure levels were unrealistically high. I would advise caution before using either of these arguments to discount the NTP results. Here’s why:

1) There is no assurance that later cell phone systems (3G, 4G and soon 5G) are any safer. Indeed, two German labs ran independent experiments exposing mice to 3G and in each case they found higher rates of cancer.

2) With respect to levels of exposure, it’s important to understand that the NTP (as well as one of the German labs using 3G) saw a stronger effect at low doses. The fact is no one yet knows how much is too much cell phone radiation exposure.

Without saying why, federal traffic safety officials have quietly altered crash data, revealing that more than three times as many people die in wrecks linked to tire failures than previously acknowledged.

A conviction for domestic violence in the U.S. strips a person of the legal right to possess a gun. It doesn't matter if the conviction is a misdemeanor or a felony. The rationale for the federal law: Domestic violence is a red flag for future violence — including potentially deadly violence with a firearm.

Despite mounting casualties from crashes of recreational off-highway vehicles, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has shot down a proposal to track injuries and deaths involving the popular trail machines.